• Tampa begins preparations for Republican National Convention

    As Tampa Bay gears up for the Republican National Convention, city officials recently announced some of its security plans for the three day event scheduled to begin on 27 August; with roughly 2,000 law enforcement officers between Tampa and Hillsborough counties, a significant number of additional officers will have to be called in from surrounding counties

  • New smartphone apps help catch thieves

    Thanks to new laptop and smartphone apps, individuals who have had their devices stolen now have a tool to help catch the thieves

  • App-enabled robocopters to bring supplies to Marines

    Marines running low on ammo may one day use an app on their digital handhelds to summon a robotic helicopter to deliver supplies within minutes; the Navy officials in charge of the program are seeking researchers who will develop threat- and obstacle-detection and avoidance systems, as well as autonomous landing capabilities that can operate across different types of aircraft

  • Helping UAVs to land safely in an emergency

    One obstacle to the wider use of UAVs in domestic missions such as law enforcement is the fact that UAV flight plans are set pre-flight, and if something goes wrong and they need to land they have no way to determining where the safest landing spot is; in most cases they just drop; engineers are developing a system which will allow UAVs sense and avoid other traffic and determine appropriate landing spots should the need arise

  • Military seeking high-pressure materials without high-pressure processes

    Military missions place tremendous stress on the materials used for defense weapons, vehicles, and other applications; applications range from stronger armor, to lighter weights which allow for faster propulsion, to greater resiliency in aerospace, ground, and naval platforms

  • Carbon Motors faces uncertain future

    Carbon Motors, the makers of the specially designed E7 police car, are struggling to survive financially and could be forced to shutter its doors if a $300 million government loan is not approved

  • Open-source searches help solve cold cases

    Two detectives receive the LexisNexis One Step Closer award for effectively using searches of open or third-party information sources to solve cold cases

  • Record high police fatalities, second year in a row

    For the second year in a row, a record number of law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty; the chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund blamed the recent spate of law enforcement deaths on budget cuts

  • LA sheriff department upgrading its 1980-era terminals

    The Los Angeles Sheriff Department is upgrading its 1980s-era terminals, for which it had become difficult for the largest sheriff’s agency in the United States to find parts; the upgrade – Raytheon’s Mobile Digital Computer System (MDCS); the MDCS project and major technology upgrade represents the largest-ever deployment of mobile digital computers to a sheriff’s department in the country

  • Chicago's new bio-attack response facility

    Chicago is preparing itself for a biological attack with the recent unveiling of a new 40,000 square-foot, fourteen story state-of the-art medical decontamination facility; the new facility is fully equipped to handle a sudden influx of patients from a biological attack or other mass casualty incident

  • Protests spur sonic blaster sales boom

    With the spate of protests from the Occupy Wall Street movement sweeping across the country, there has been a surge of interest in non-lethal crowd control systems; in particular U.S. police and first responders have taken a keen interest in Long-Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD)

  • Half of U.S. jails not in national vaccination campaign

    A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that more than half of U.S. jails are not included in the national flu vaccine campaign, despite the fact that jail and prison inmates are at increased risk of catching infectious diseases

  • On-demand emergency responder training

    New service allows fire, police, EMS, and military to provide their training video library through an on-demand delivery to any television; the service allows responders to select a video through a graphical menu on the television screen and then play, pause, restart, rewind or fast forward the video

  • Web-based interactive solution for first responders

    DGI is adding a Web-based, interactive map drawing feature to its CoBRA WEB Mapping; the solution will initially target fire departments, EMS organizations, bomb squads, HAZMAT teams, and police departments as a situational awareness tool to assist in the collaboration of first responders and emergency operation centers